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Special pages :
Stein (1849)
First published: in Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 225, February 18, 1849.
Cologne, February 16. The Breslau “Association for Law and Order” (an association “with God for King and Fatherland"[1] ) has addressed an open letter to Dr. Julius Stein which states, inter alia, that Neue Rheinische Zeitung let itself be deceived just as much as the worthy philistines of Breslau by the conservative speeches of Herr Stein and “considered him lost for the cause of democracy”.
We like definite positions. We have never flirted with a parliamentary party. The party we represent, the party of the people, exists in Germany as yet only in an elementary form. But where it is a matter of a struggle against the existing Government, we ally ourselves even with our enemies. We accept as a fact the official Prussian opposition as it has arisen out of the hitherto pitiful conditions of German culture, and therefore, during the electoral struggle, we put our own views into the background. Now, after the elections, we are again asserting our old ruthless point of view in relation not only to the Government, but also to the official opposition.
The “Association for Law and Order” is mistaken. We do not consider Herren Stein, Waldeck and Co. as “lost for the cause of democracy”. We have always congratulated democracy on not being represented by people like Stein, Waldeck and Co.
In one of our first issues we stated that the extreme Left of the Berlin Agreement Assembly, with the exception of three or four persons, would form the extreme Right in a Convention. We never included Stein and Waldeck among these three or four persons.
As for Herr Stein himself, we recall the time when he attacked the republicans on fanatically constitutional grounds, when in the Schlesische Zeitung he roundly denounced the representatives of the working class and had them denounced by a schoolteacher whose ideas were akin to his own and who is now a member of the “Association for Law and Order”.
Just as pitiful as the Agreement Assembly itself was the so-called democratic group of this Assembly. It could be foreseen that these gentlemen, in order to be re-elected, would now recognise the imposed Constitution. It is characteristic of the standpoint of these gentlemen that after the elections they are disavowing in the democratic clubs what before the elections they assented to at meetings of the electors. This petty, crafty liberal slyness was never the diplomacy of revolutionaries.
- ↑ Citizens’ associations (Bürgervereine), consisting of moderate liberal elements, appeared in Prussia after the March revolution. Their aim was to preserve “law and order” within the framework of a constitutional monarchy, and to combat “anarchy”, i.e. the revolutionary-democratic movement. The last article of the Constitution imposed on December 5, 1848, and the decree on the convocation of the Chambers provided for a revision of the Constitution by the two Chambers before it was finally accepted and sworn to. The Prussian ruling circles subsequently availed themselves of this provision to revise the Constitution along the lines of extending royal prerogatives and the privileges of the aristocracy and the Junkers.